Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/187

Rh paradise where there were gold, silver and precious stones. Can we go one step further and examine the places where civilisation first sprang up in Central America? The first civilisation that we know of in this region is that of the Maya, who founded cities in Southern Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. These people seem to have chosen extraordinary places in which to build their first cities. "To-day," we are told by Professor Huntington, "the most progressive and energetic people of Guatemala, its densest population, its greatest towns, its center of wealth, learning and culture, so far as these things exist, are all greatest in the relatively open, healthful, easily accessible and easily tillable highlands; in the past these same things were localised in the most inaccessible, unhealthful, and untillable low lands the greatest civilisation grew up in the densely forested, highly feverish, and almost untillable lowlands of Peten and Eastern Guatemala." He says further that "in their achievements in overcoming an adverse environment, we are perhaps obliged to put them on a pinnacle above any other race that ever lived They certainly were a remarkable people." Professor Huntington, as you know, suggests that in former times the climate was far different in many parts of the earth from what it is now, and he tends to explain the vicissitudes of civilisation in this area, as in others, as the result of climatic changes. I have no time to examine here the thesis of Professor Huntington. It is sufficient to remark that, in founding Copan on a tributary of the Motagua river, the Maya have chosen what is now the most important gold-producing river of Central America. Practically all the other great Maya cities lie in the Peten strip of the Atlantic forest, and in Chiapas, Tabasco, and Campeche, provinces of Mexico. Dr. Elliot Smith tells me